That being said, I tried Airbnb in NY a few times and it was absolutely disgusting. In most places Airbnbs will be a bit dirtier than a hotel but in NY it wasn't even close. Rats, cockroaches, showers that don't drain, grime everywhere... After a few experiences like that I was out. Hotels in NY offer a much better experience.
This is because NYC’s hotel labor unions successfully lobbied to enact a law requiring city council approval to build new hotels in the city. Effectively damning any new developments to endless hand wringing and grandstanding from NIMBYs and other interests.
Many new hotels in recent years were staffed with non-union labor, this was their way to secure leverage in perpetuity.
I’m sympathetic to the union’s position, but this law is going to damage the city’s economy and make NYC unaffordable for many wishing to visit.
https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2022/12/09/how-special-are-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/nyregion/hotels-tourism-n...
I really wouldn't classify this as a problem. It's completely possible today to book a hotel room in NY at all manner of price points. The prices are not noticeably different than anytime in the past few years.
There is a ton of hotel inventory in NYC. If I was a resident, I wouldn't even want more hotels built because the city is already full to the brim with tourists and lacking space for affordable residential property.
If you actually ask the average resident they would probably shrug or have a negative opinion of lowering the barrier to tourism. This also isn’t uncommon, major destinations like Barcelona and Venice are trying to limit arrivals outright.
Let's build a cruise ship in China or the Netherlands and then use it as a floating hotel in NYC
I'm also seeing there are 123,000 hotel rooms and there were 40,000 airbnb listing in NYC.
This seems to suggest that supply of airbnb will materially change total hotel listings.
- You need a "long term" stay, like 3-6 weeks. When I travel over seas, I usually stay in a single city for at least 3 weeks. Having an AirBnB makes sense. I don't need daily cleaning and having a kitchen is great! - You need a full house for a family gathering.
Neither of these compete with hotels.
Granted, there were options for these types of stays before AirBnB (VRBO and private listings), but AirBnB elevated these.
AirBnBs allows you to stay in neighborhoods where people actually live. This is a huge difference for a lot of folks.
- you get more space, a nicer room, for cheaper than an equivalent hotel
Which I'm not sure about NYC specifically, but has generally been true everywhere in the world I've gone
But honestly, I'm skeptical. You have something like 60+ million people visiting NYC every year. Airbnb's inventory was tiny in comparison to that. Also, tourism absolutely cratered during COVID and hasn't fully rebound yet, so there's likely plenty of spare capacity.
They already have, by double-digit figures [1]. Both in terms of rates and average revenue per room.
There are a lot of hotels in New York. But within each lodging category, in each neighbourhood, it’s more limited. During marquee events (UN, fashion week, et cetera) or the holidays, a given set of hotels have a virtual oligopoly, as the alternative is hoofing it from New Jersey.
[1] https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/consumer-markets/hospit...
Meanwhile, office rental space are in trouble, such an irony.
Also, while this may not apply to NYC, I will never ever book hotels on a long term basis but apartments because I just don't want to eat out but instead feel at home with kitchen etc. Airbnb or booking.com flats are my go to option wherever I go. Again, not particularly relevant for NYC simply because it was already too expensive to stay there for an extended amount of time.
Now, you didn't have 100% privacy, but back then, I just wanted a cheap place to stay.
Since then, AirBnB are just commercial properties.
If your'e curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_low-cost_airlines_on...
Even then, I used to occasionally see roaches in my unit. I can’t imagine what it’s like when you have an AirBnb with some very transient tenants and no pest control.
The supply is lower now. The demand is the same. The prices must go up from the people competing for the smaller number of rooms. This is also why it caused rents to rise.
Except it hasn't. Hotel prices are the same today in NY as they were when Airbnb was going full blast. Again, NYC has always had excess hotel inventory. There is no shortage that would effect pricing. You can check right now on Expedia and see that prices are roughly the same as last year and the year before that.
Supply and demand works in both directions.
1. Of course hotels will get more expensive. This is basic supply and demand at work. As another poster commented, the total amount of AirBnB inventory in NYC was material. Saying "hotels still have to compete with each other" is just missing the absolute basics of Micro-econ 101.
2. Of course, as others have posted, the whole point of these AirBnB crackdowns is to make more long term rentals affordable. It's really just about shifting supply from STR to LTR, so you'd expect prices to go up in one market and down in the other.
3. Regarding AirBnB, "It might be cheaper, but you will wish you spent the extra bucks" has to be the most eye-rolling comment I saw. Many people simply don't have "extra bucks" lying around. I certainly remember when I was younger thinking there were many trips I just wouldn't have gone on without AirBnB. It's the same reason budget airlines are so popular - people know they suck, but especially in a city like NYC the expectation is you are hardly spending any time in your room besides sleeping in the first place, so people are willing to accept the tradeoff. Plus, access to a kitchen can by huge in terms of cost savings while in NYC.
Not if the hotels are sitting on off-market inventory. I'm not a hotel general manager, so I assume whatever analysis I would do would be overly simplistic. I just know that hotel rooms often go empty, so AirBnB rooms leaving the market might not affect supply and demand in simple ways.
> Hyatt announced a new vacation rental platform, Homes & Hideaways by World of Hyatt, the same day Chesky was speaking.
That's one good thing is that it keeps hotels on their toes and forced them to play in that market as well.
> Further, IHG is even offering 10,000 IHG One Rewards points to travelers who can prove their New York City Airbnb reservation was canceled in light of the new city policy.
That sounds like an interesting approach. Just the ad itself is enough to turn heads. 10k points is not a huge amount but might still get a number of customers. When a competitor mistreats a customer, and you're the one helping them solve their issue, they'll remember that forever.
0 problems.
I hate that the fees are hidden until you are about to pay, but the actual service is like renting out a furnished apartment/house. Way back when, people were renting out rooms in their home, so you actually got to talk to a host to get advice about the area, and the home was decent.
Today its basically a bunch of landlords who have some property manager and cleaning service taking care of a furnished apartment/house.
But its just another hotel-style company. I imagine you havent tried chatgpt either.
people have overwhelmingly positive experiences with airbnb and a few outliers, or people make fun of the pricing of the fees
but the actual experience is pretty benign
I was an early proponent of Airbnb, when it was just geeks renting their flats out for the weekend. But growth meant it had to take over more housing. Taking it away from residents and turning it over to tourists. I wanted it to "Live like a local" but when you have entire buildings dedicated to short term rentals none of the locals are around.
That sounds all great, but you also wonder if these well-meaning regulations are the reason why Europe is so far on the decline.
I'm not convinced NYC did the right thing here. You are destroying a large part of the tourism industry in favor of a mere ~10k new listings, still controlled by landlords. You wonder how much this is going to hurt the government's bottom line.
I hope this means lower rent for New Yorkers, 15,000 apartments possibly going back to the rental market seems like something positive.
The reason rents are high in New York is primarily because it's tourist hotspot, but because people are serving a market. If you want rents to be cheaper in NYC then the fix here is really to make the city less desirable to tourists so people don't want to stay for the week. But then is it even New York?
In an ideal world New York could have low rents, be a tourist hot spot and be a place people can live and raise kids. In reality that's never going to happen, and politicians trying to "fix" the problems with New York is just a waste of resources and is going to come at the cost of people who invested in property in NYC to serve the actual demands of the city (yeah, I know f** landlords, etc).
The solution here, if anything, is transportation and remote working. Ideally people should be able to easily and affordably commute into cities like New York when needed, but they shouldn't feel they have to live there. But even this is probably too utopian. Not everyone is a software engineer with the luxury of remote working after all.
If you ask most people why they airbnb over hotels they say its because I can take my family or group of friends to an airbnb, where as in a hotel we'd need to get 4-5 rooms.
In most other cities you can trivially find 5 bedroom places that fit that bill. In New York I'm not sure you can find alot of 5 or 6 bedroom places, especially in Manhattan.
So airbnb's main draw for most people just isn't available in New York in a way that it would be in most other large cities.
Which means you'd expect alot less people to use airbnb over a hotel in New York.
Customers think they are getting more for their money via a short-term rental platform like AirBnB.
The perception is that Hotels have all kinds of additional services (staff, etc) to pay that (somehow) AirBnB hosts don't. The glossy adverts show you a loving, warm, full-of-character home to visit, whilst most hotels have an almost cold, faceless image of nothing but dimly-lit corridor after corridor of numbered rooms.
Reality is most of the properties are owned or managed by rental megacorps, are priced very highly to hide all the commission and fees, they sit empty for long periods of time between rentals, and they get cleaned and maintained _far_ less frequently than hotel rooms do.
I’ve spent a lot of time nomadic freelancing in the past 10 years. In most cities around the world, a room on Airbnb is about the same price as a bed in a hostel. And a hotel is usually double the price.
My needs as a traveller are certainly less important than those of the residents in the cities I visit. Nonetheless, I still lament, as the ever-growing ban on Airbnbs effectively kills the nomadic lifestyle.
This analysis doesn't make any sense given that New York was a huge part of AirBnB's overall inventory, being their biggest market worldwide for a long time.
Was NYC their biggest market?
Where can i find the data you're using?
I'll be thinking of the hotel customers when i'm paying my rent.
But they did move the needle on quality of life for people who live there, which is whom the government represents. Historically it’s the visitors who get soaked everywhere (car rental fees at airport, hotel visitor taxes and of course Cheesecake Factory in Times Square). The sheer mass of these charges in NY are another reason why Airbnb had no impact on costs.
Of the residents, there are a lot more pissed off renters and neighbors than there are AirBNB hosts.
I feel hypocritical, because with a young child Airbnb is awesome for trips. We get space and separate rooms. But I understand the strain it's putting on our system (I'm Canadian).
A weird quirk of America is that we are so obsessed with tourism that we are willing to sacrifice quality of life for people who live in one place, for the benefit of a bunch of people who visit for 3-4 days.
This is the peak of that thinking.
Would you like to set up a bet on this? We can use the average 1 br rent in NYC as the target. To protect against seasonal effects we'll take the min and max over a 1 y period before this occurs and after this occurs. You win if both are lower over 1 y than they are now. I win if both are higher over 1 y. If there's a mix, we call it a tie.
https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/new-york... can be our source
Rents will go down vs. where it would be otherwise. Almost nothing deflates in nominal dollars ever.
Backlash was never about hotel prices, it was always about the externalities like rampant real estate speculation driving up housing costs and hollowing out neighborhoods for a quick buck. The corporate economic pollution.
Turns out there's a certain point where people want their quality of life. Ignoring this angle is completely disingenuous and tone deaf, but hey, if your argument can't stand on the merits, throw in a fear-mongering distraction. CEO-speak 101.
Unfortunately, I do believe the extra burden will lead to less construction and I worry that short-term stays will indeed become more expensive because of the lower supply of rooms.
Hotels aren't blameless either. in my city they cancelled a ton of reservations and blamed a technical fault.. when really they wanted to charge more after a concert was announced.
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/taylor-swift-book...
airbnb has been banned and regulated heavily in a lot of places already. has this happened anywhere? all i see is rents keep going up
Forcing people to commute in from Jersey City is a huge net drain on NYC's economy.
> At the end of 2019, New York City ended the year with 703 hotels operating in the city and 138,000 available rooms. A year earlier, New York City had 672 hotels operating with 122,000 rooms.
And that was before Covid took tons of inventory offline, though guessing a lot of that has rebounded.
https://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2020/06/17/nyc-may-...
Fwiw for reference, I'm seeing that Las Vegas has ~150,000, LA has ~98,000, and Philadelphia has ~30,000. I'm assuming for a lot of these the numbers would expand/contract if you change the boundaries.
Vegas and Orlando have a lot of rooms but are also highly seasonal, and there are definitely off periods with lots of deals. Also unlike Vegas or Orlando New York has a lot of hotels in surrounding areas as well; hotels in New Jersey are not included in this number, but there are a bunch between EWR and Manhattan.
$250 a night is insanity. I guess I should be thankful I visited NYC when I did, because it looks like I’ll never be able to afford to go back.
New York hotel prices are up double digits year over year [1].
[1] https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/consumer-markets/hospit...
I think it comes from newspapers looking to shorten headlines.
https://www.alltherooms.com/resources/articles/average-airbn...
I assume both the 87% hotel occupancy and 20% airbnb occupancy are much higher on weekends or special days, for instance. Pretty easy to see how prices will rise in select areas and many days.
I’m currently in Poland and I’m renting an entire apartment on Airbnb for less than a bed in a hostel, let alone a hotel. Anywhere in Europe a room in an Airbnb seems to be on par with the price of a bed in a hostel.
We are not space constrained. Like in California, housing shortage is a policy choice by New York’s voters. (In this case, we chose to shift some of the burden onto tourists versus property owners.)
I'm sorry but New York is famously space constrained. There is no new Manhattan land showing up any time soon.
Facts over fame.
New York City’s population density, 11,200/sq. km [1], doesn’t even make the top-100 list globally [2]. There are a handful of blocks in Midtown, the Wesr Side and downtown that approach anything close to densities where our ability to build constrains us.
> There is no new Manhattan land showing up any time soon
I have a flat next to a surface-level parking lot in central Manhattan! We have a ton of infill potential before even asking about the two- and three-story buildings that make up most of our residential structures.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_Cit...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_pop...
That is not indicative of poor functioning.
It's like saying 'a well functioning human has a six pack and reads 20 books a week.' Like sure one can do those things, but I think it's probably true of neither of us.
You said NY was not space constrained. It's a fact that it is space constrained. Maybe you could squeeze out a bit of density but it is most definitely space constrained.
I'm not a big fan of what happened to my neighborhood (Williamsburg) with all the giant condo buildings that have gone up over the past decade or so, but people do need places to live and we probably should be growing denser across the entire city. There's definitely a lot of space left, just not a lot of will to change things.